He tried to shake off such wayward thoughts. By a brilliant series of manoeuvres he had captured Agbat less painfully than the town of Amrel. His knights-in-shining-overalls were making merry in the main square, while he unrolled his map, and put a volume of the stationmaster’s statistics at each of the four corners to hold it down. The final phase of his advance was about to begin, and he was so much assailed by the rights and wrongs of it that he almost hoped he would be killed in the battles ahead, especially when he thought back on his carefree time as a mere tourist in this chaotic haphazard paradise, and knew with melancholic certainty that such enjoyment would never return.
He sighed, and went back to his planning, deciding to leave a hundred soldiers and two heavy machine guns to hold Agbat, which would defend his communications with Amrel and the frontier, so that when he resumed his push towards Tungsten he would know that his retreat to Cronacia was halfway open should anything go wrong. He never advanced without being sure that he could retreat, an axiom that no amount of heady and easy success could turn him from. There was no advance without a retreat, and no retreat without an advance, and no ground was ever covered twice, because even if you actually went over it again, you were in another frame of mind, and circumstances were different anyway. No one day resembled the one that had preceded it, nor the one that was on its way from tomorrow, and he didn’t need any nihilistic philosophy to remind him of such a natural law, though in a sense it made him more comfortable to be constantly aware of the fact.
Even the insurrection was run, it seemed, on nihilistic principles, which was why he enjoyed it so much, and he realized that when the dragon of nihilism was split down the middle and bleeding to death, he might not like it here any more. In some strange way, and at this late hour, honesty and nihilism might after all be related, an observation which for the moment lightened his mood.
Even that waiting space-rocket, set to charge for the heavens in a few days’ time, out of which the finest male specimen and the juiciest female of the line would emerge for the long-planned well-advertised extravaganza of sex-in-space, was nothing more than a dramatic manifestation of Nihilon’s health and honesty. Yet it was a show he felt obliged to destroy, for if it succeeded, nihilism would reign forever glorious. Who then would argue over its merits? — though in becoming an eternal fact of life it would certainly lose all possible attraction for him.
There was a knock at the door, and one of his soldiers shuffled over the dusty boards to announce that they had found a strange woman.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ Benjamin demanded.
‘It’s a woman, commander. We were patrolling towards the railway bridge, and saw that she was being ravished by two Nihilists. We heard her screaming for help, so we killed them.’
She had fallen, and when they carried her in, Benjamin saw that she was a young woman, her dress torn, and her blood-stained face smeared with ash and dust. He was too absorbed in his favourite work of planning his attacks to like being disturbed, and if he had been a Nihilist officer advancing against the forces of law and decency, order and honesty, he would have told them to finish raping her themselves instead of bothering him.
Hair straggled over her breasts and shoulders, and when he at last looked at her closely, she opened her eyes, and saw a brutalized generalissimo with a shaved head, wearing bush-shirt and trousers, a belt around his waist from which hung a revolver. Her lips trembled, as if about to open for a scream. ‘All right, then,’ she said weakly, not believing that her good luck in being saved by the two madmen could last, ‘get it over with. I might as well die in this awful country.’
He drew back at the shock of hearing her speak. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, putting a chair by her so that she could sit down, then sending the two soldiers away. When she pushed her hair back over her scratch-covered face, he felt himself on the point of choking. He took a bottle from his desk, and poured her a glass of Nihilitz. ‘Drink this, Jaquiline. It’s a terrible potion, but you’ll feel better,’ his stomach twisting with black rage against this country and its nihilism.
He knelt, to keep the glass steady at her mouth. She said nothing, but gulped the Nihilitz. He took the glass away, and held her hands, saw that she wasn’t wounded badly, but supposed that her experiences had been full of the usual Nihilon nightmare. ‘I want to go home,’ she cried, ‘I want to get out.’
‘You’re quite safe. There are more than two thousand honest soldiers to guard you. What fools we were to let a woman come alone into this foul place. But the Nihilists will pay for this. I’ll burn them out. I’ll destroy them. I’ll lay the country waste between here and Tungsten. I’ll plough this land with so much dynamite there won’t even be a breath of nihilism left in it.’
Her eyes closed from utter exhaustion, and relief at such unexpected deliverance. He helped her into the next room, where she lay on his camp-bed, and with a heavy blanket drawn over, she sank into a deep sleep.
When she sat beside him next morning in his Thundercloud Estate car, her face showed little of her ordeal. Her blue eyes were the colour of steel as she looked ahead at the rocky and winding trail that led into the mountains. She wore an olive-green shirt, a pair of men’s slacks, and sandals on her feet. A belt around her waist had a holster hanging from it, with a loaded pistol inside.
Advancing patrols were already far ahead, marking the track where it became uncertain, fanning out for snipers, crowning the neighbouring heights for any sign of resistance or ambush. Benjamin’s burning zeal to rid Nihilon of its detestable régime had decided Jaquiline to work for the same end.
Such bravery and suffering in a beautiful young woman filled him with a fatherly love for her, and he agreed that she could come with the column. And Jaquiline felt a liking for this new Benjamin she had found so unexpectedly in the wastes of Nihilon. As an acquaintance of the last two years she had looked on him as no more than a brash hedonist, but it was now obvious that he was a man of deeply fundamental ideals whom she had been wrong to misjudge. Where else could his good qualities have been brought out except in a place like Nihilon? She turned and smiled tenderly at him as he set the car in motion.
The landscape of grey rock, ash, and pumice glistened under the scorching sun. Their car climbed over backs and shoulders of land, sometimes ascending several hundred metres in sharp curves of the track. The region appeared to be sparsely inhabited, but now and again steep narrow cuttings in the mountainside, cleverly hidden by the complex configuration of the land, showed clusters of small houses at the bottom, presumably built around springs or streams, for small green trees grew down there, and on either side of the indentation, terraces had been built some way up the banks, long strips of verdure vividly glowing. Occasional belts of terracing were fallow, or had just been harvested, and the soil was so dark it looked like pure soot.
More bushes appeared, and a few trees as they ascended, as well as a house here and there by the roadside. Even the squalor-ridden children playing out of doors, who laughed and waved at them, seemed fortunate and picturesque to Jaquiline when she thought that their day of deliverance from vile nihilism was close at hand. At a thousand metres the air grew cooler, for they were approaching the plateau on which the Groves of Aspron were situated. Then the track suddenly turned into a wide, paved highway, a miracle of unexpected road-building in this remote area of Nihilon.
‘It’ll go on for a few miles, then end in a swamp, or at the edge of a cliff,’ Benjamin said. ‘I’ve met this sort of thing before. Nobody can tell how these isolated stretches of perfect road get here, or why they were built, but they seem to be a characteristic feature of this country.’